off to find stories and, hopefully, an f ‘ing job in Amsterdam. Back soon.

Lunch with an amazing woman on Friday, an immigrant who arrived in New York in her late teens. She started work at a bank, bought her mother a house on her credit card, joined a hedge fund, made millions, then retired to read life “manuals’ like the Bible, cover to cover. All by the age of 42. Modest, indeed shy, at times, her mind functions faster than fucking FiOS. But I always tease her about her secretiveness; about the fact I have to cajole her into revealing even the titles of the books she reads. It’s as if any personal information, no matter how trivial, might, somehow, compromise or endanger her.

This resistance/reticence probably came in her mother’s milk-a genetic trait that evolved with generation after generation growing up in a society of watchers; a culture in which survival relied on remaining forever silent and unseen.   I am more and more  astonished by just how extraordinary the stories of other people’s lives can be, particularly because of all that is  unspoken.  In any case, this woman opened up a bit at lunch.  In town to sell a piece of property, she talked about what’s going on in the financial world. Still intimately connected to the powers-that-be among the 1%, I take everything she says as gospel.  And what she had to say about investing perplexed and depressed me. 

Unlike herself, I have a miniscule amount of savings that are  ‘accruing’ a ridiculous .25% in CD’s. The annual return at .25% barely covers a night on the town, never mind whatever future I might have as a rapidly aging baby boomer.  So I asked her if there was somewhere else I could put my money that would earn enough to cover the price of a couple of premium brand cocktails. 

There isn’t anywhere unless you’re willing to take risks.

I can’t afford risks, I said. Not anymore.

Then real estate is the only option. I’m putting whatever profits I make on the sale right back into a condo. Renting  is the only way I see to generate any kind of real income. 

In other words, even with the stock market back in the neighborhood of 13,000, I’m screwed. This, while the Sunday New York Times Real Estate section runs a feature, called Big Buy. Big Buy covers the city sale of the week, sales with price tags that range from a paltry $16 million for a townhouse or apartment, all the way up to $60 million. These are numbers that leave most of us gasping for breath like people who climb Macchu Pichu without oxygen. Especially when we also happen to know that the buyers don’t actually live in these places. Perish the thought. They pass through, a couple of days a year, like fugitives on the run. Of course,  paying $30 million for an apartment is a criminal act to begin with.  So they probably are fugitives on the run.

But then the talk turned to the nature and the necessity of risk, in general.  A subject that hits even closer to home, in the emotional sense, than the prospect of selling the one I live in and love. Despite a somewhat feral, precarious childhood (a childhood I once described as similar to playing a game of hide and seek with everybody hiding and nobody, seeking), I’m not overly fearful. Anxious, yes.  I spent years travelling alone.  I’ve put myself ‘out there’ with my writing, both a memoir and a novel. I try to embrace  the absolute joy and ignore the terror of being a mother. But until recently, none of these “life choices” felt particularly risky,  brave, or even mildly daring. They felt natural. It’s only now that I have a reached what they call, ‘a certain age’, an age of total uncertainty, that I understand how intimate the connection is between risk and confidence. As my friend also said at lunch: “The ability to take risks is the definition of freedom. It is what keeps you alive.” 

More tomorrow 

Last night, we had a Russian friend, a native of St. Petersburg, and her 14-year-old daughter for dinner. They live in one of those glorious 17th century townhouses on the Herengracht in Amsterdam. We talked about the weather. Yes, the weather. For the first time in eight years, it was cold enough to freeze the canals. Which is cause for great celebration all over Holland. The entire country took to their skates and glided from city to city, stopping at pop-up kiosks enroute for mulled wine, hot cider, and finger food. I heard that her husband, the original flying Dutchman if ever there was one, complained because he’d missed the marathon. An event in which thousands skate through eleven different cities in under three hours. Slight of build, R. is a man who sits and stands so ramrod straight, I’m convinced his bones will break if forced to bend. And yet, I picture him on the ice, hands clasped lightly behind his back, skimming, swooping so low and so fast across the frozen surface,  he looks like a bird on blades. Just imagine those silvery blades, shooting sparks and reflecting the silvery, pearly light of a Vermeer painting.  What magic! 

But they’re a mysterious bunch, the Dutch. Opaque. This skating—a national passion versus sport—says a great deal about how they’ve managed not simply to survive but to thrive throughout the centuries. All while laying low, while skating beneath the world’s radar. We took a trip to visit these friends at their farm in Freisland, a couple of summers ago. It wasn’t the cows or canals or even that hallucinogenic glimpse of the sea hovering over the landscape that seemed half as surreal as the news that many people in the area still had no credit cards. So while the rest of us tiptoed across thinner and thinner ice, weighed down by the burden of debt, the Dutch just continued to skate. As lightly as birds on blades.

But I digress. Always. Because the real point of my post is what has happened to the 14-year old daughter. A few months ago, she sent me a manuscript of her novel. (The first in a trilogy, by the way.) As uncannily intelligent and driven as she is, I didn’t have great expectations. I mean, she started writing when she was twelve. We’re talking 8th grade. Here’s what I was doing in 8th grade. I was in boarding school, wishing I was two inches taller and had bigger breasts. I was not writing a fucking trilogy. But the book blew me away. The concept, the characters, her terrifying cleverness…  I was delighted to say, yes, when she asked for some help with the pitch.  One should never discourage the dreams of the young, right. Hah! Not only has the editor-of chief of a huge publishing company forwarded it to one of the city’s hottest agents, another literary superpower wants to send it straight into the hands of a senior editor at the most respected house in town. It’s pretty hilarious, giving advice about handling  buzz to a 14- year- old, especially when you’re in the midst of a writer’s block that feels as solid and unyielding as the ice on a Dutch canal. Stay tuned for her appearances on The Today Show and Charlie Rose. She’s going to make the hard luck Cinderella story of the woman in the trailer park who wrote Harry Potter seem positively banal! 

In the meantime, a very funny e mail from an old friend—an enigmatic man I have always considered a saint of sorts. The e is about my future as the last land-line user….

I have a theory (and a cell phone) that when Armageddon arrives (mini or otherwise) since everyones’ lives, bank accounts, maps, correspondence etc are increasingly on their phones and hence will be inaccessible because the phones won’t function…What will be valuable will be land lines or following that idea —people who know how to communicate without cell phones so YOU could end up being  in charge of entire Northeast quadrant… It’s a lot of responsibility not having a cell phone.

More later.

but love this story from Joseph Epstein’s predictably slender, somewhat shallow, book,  Gossip.

Epstein is invited to a dinner down in D.C. with the painter Helen Frankenthaler and two friends from the NEA. Half way through the meal, Dick and Lynn Cheney join them. The Iraq war has just started. Helen and Lynn get on like a house on fire, chatting and laughing straight through dessert. When she and Dick leave in a hurry, Helen turns to the group and says: “My God, what a marvelous woman. I loved her. But what does the husband do?” 

SILENCE

“Well, ummm,he’s actually the Secretary of Defense,” says Epstein, straight-faced.

“Oh,” is all Helen says in reply.

I had an encounter, recently, that reminded me of the anecdote. I went to a lovely dinner out at a friend’s house in Brooklyn. There was a gamine-like blonde, huge eyes, standing all by herself in the middle of the room. I made a bee line for her, as I always do when I see someone standing alone at a party. (Because it could be me.) And we, too, got on a like a house on fire. She was Romanian. So we talked and talked about everything from my favorite Romanian writers… Well, the only Romanian writers I’ve read: Cioran, Ionesco, Von Rezzori. We also talked politics and I reminisced about a trip I took to Bucharest and Sinaia back in the early 80’s.  When we sat down at the table, we continued to chat, ignoring everyone around us. I’ve never been so rude. Finally, I looked at her and smiled. “My God,” I said. “You are so bright. What do you do?”

“I”m an actress,” she says.

“Oh no,” I say, hand to mouth. “NOT an actress.”

And then the penny drops. “Fuck,” I say. “Of course, you are. You were brilliant in.. and I name the movie that won her a best actress award at Cannes. “And I  saw such and such, too. It haunted me for days. I am totally embarassed.”

She just grinned. “This is why I like it here. Nobody knows me.” 

 I would love to know what that feels like… The luxury versus the torture of total anonymity. Anyway, apologies for the lack of wit/brilliance today. Just can’t be bothered to make the effort.

Remember me mentioning ‘analog’ smoking in  my post on Tuesday? Probably not. Anyway, I do own an electronic cigarette. My husband gave it to me in the hopes it would help me quit. Well, I just threw it out. Seems this guy in Florida got his fucking face blown off while puffing away yesterday. The explosion knocked out his front teeth. And he lost part of his tongue. Jesus! is all I can say. I know it isn’t funny. But it certainly is ironic.  Talk about hazardous to your health.  I mean, if there’s one warning you DON’T see on the side of an ‘analog’  pack, it’s Danger. This may explode in your face!

But that’s not why I’m writing. I’ve bored you all stupid by now with my crush on Jay Z. So it’s time I moved on. To my literary god, Edward St. Aubyn. I saw him last night at some incredibly bizarre ‘event’ at Barnes&Noble. At first,I thought maybe I was hallucinating. He must have thought so, too. Because there he was up there on the podium in his beautifully bespoke midnight blue suit and suede shoes with a scruffy, mullet haired, folk rocker from Ohio named Joseph Arthur. (Who also arrived with a band.)  

“So who’s that guy in the suit,” a young, heavily made up, tattooed girl said to her friend.(Oh My God, I’m thinking. Is this really happening?)

“Must be Arthur’s agent,” the friend replied.

I laughed out loud. But if there’s one thing this old-fashioned British aristocat has held onto, despite sexual abuse, a lifetime of drug addiction, and other horrors too numerous to name, it’s his good manners (and his humor.)  There he sat, gently tapping his foot, while Arthur wailed his way through a song called, I Miss the Zoo. (It was about addiction.)

“I miss the zoo, too,” dead panned  Aubyn with his oh so public school accent as Arthur put down his guitar.

He then read a passage from the Melrose Trilogy. An hilarious scene at a dinner party with Princess Margaret.

barely skipping a beat, the moderator clapped and looked at her notes. “Tell us that story, Joseph, about how Peter Gabriel discovered you.” When the musician got to the end of the story, he mentioned the fact he’d once lived in London.

“And what about you?” he said to St. Aubyn. “Where are you from?”

“London,” St. Aubyn replied with a grin.

“I bet we know some of the same people,” Arthur said.”It’s a small world, right?”

“Perhaps, we do,” Aubyn replied, genially. 

How much more insane can this get, I wondered. But as the evening went on, both men relaxed. Mutually intrigued, even amused, by the total incongruity and absurdity of the moment and their meeting, they seemed to like each other.  

I listened  as St Aubyn talked about his terror of the spotlight. “When I finished the trilogy, I didn’t want anyone to read what I’d written. Now, I want everyone to read what I’ve written.’

And I wanted to ask.” Has all the recognition, the raves, changed how you see yourself?’

I wasn’t curious about the fame. He’s a man who has openly confessed to feeling so ashamed,so repulsive earlier in his life, he wanted to kill himself. Which is also why he wrote. “It was either that or suicide,” he said.

St Aubyn was raped by his own father as a five-year-old child. Repeatedly.  Loved but ignored by a feckless, complicit mother, a ‘do gooder’  American heiress with millions who left the only real home he’d ever known to a self help guru, his autobiographical novels are certainly not for the faint of heart. Yet for me, this is what makes them so singularly brilliant. There is almost unimaginable cruelty, desperate loneliness, needle driven despair. But there is also compassion. And of course, humor. Which means the reader feels great empathy not pity for the character.  Then, there is the writing itself. For instance, I like Martin Amis. I love the WAY he writes. But sometimes, I am so aware of the way he writes; of his sorcerer-like mastery of structure; of language and his wit, his cleverness, that I feel no affinity for his characters. It’s strange, that dissonance. Amis rarely reveals the heart that hides behind his extraordinary mind. He writes like some kind of enraged, albeit distant, spectator. Aubyn’s writing, on the other hand, is so intimate, so naked and openly painful that there are instances as a reader when I literally want to close my eyes; when I’m tempted to squeeze them shut like a kid watching a scary movie

Before the line formed for his signing, the moderator asked Aubyn what had made him such a great mimic. (The book is full of pitch perfect mimicry.)

“Mimics,” he said. “Speak in other people’ voices because they have no voice of their own; because they’re terrified of being heard.”

Well, if ever there were a writer, a man, who has found his own voice, it’s Edward St. Aubyn. I can only hope that in being heard, he feels less alone.

Last week, I met this great kid, this 24 year-old guy who’d just flown in from L.A. with nothing but a small wheelie, his own set of knives, and hopes of being hired…Not as a hit man but as a sous chef. He kept talking about his last job as a forager. What the fuck is it, these days, everybody talking foraging? I mean, I get it. In the woods or the wilderness. But in cities like L.A. and New York?  It sounds like something out of The Road or Zone 1.  Are these guys/gals really out there in Central Park, pulling up dandelions and chokeberries. Or is foraging just another word for shopping at the farmer’s market. 

Yesterday, I read a rave about some new downtown restaurant that features Soil and Cooked as menu classifications. The chef is big into eggshells and cauliflower foam served on a bed of chicken wire and tubers smoked on little pyres of hay. Huh? How the hell do servers chat about “specials” like this without guffawing? Naturally, the place is a huge hit for fashionable ‘locavores’ and urban ‘hunter gatherers.’ Which is another recent turn of phrase that has me in stitches. 

Seriously tho… I am fascinated by the language; by these fantastically primitive frames of reference. It’s like trying to picture a cave man carrying an iPhone. There’s also something truly dystopian (or utterly insane) about ordering an appetizer of eggshells and cauliflower foam with chicken wire and tubers smoked on a a pyre of hay.  Aside from paying $14.00 for it, I mean. (I guess hay is hard to find in Manhattan. Unless, of course, you’re a forager.)Still, I suspect the language is some sort of reflex response; a way of reminding us we’re still human and not at the mercy of technology. Speaking of which… We went out with friends on Saturday nite to a Chinese restaurant. This was after seeing the one man show, Steve Jobs, the Agony and The Ecstasy. There was a table of 10 very attractive, young women next to us. They barely exchanged a word. I’m talking dead silence during the entire meal. And  what do you think they were doing? Instead of chatting about men or the lack of men or diets and work and what they were eating. They were texting. That’s right, a girls night out with NO conversation. Thank you, Steve. For all that you’ve done  to keep us so close and in touch.  Now back to my ‘analog’ smoking. I kid you not. This is the term for those of us stupid enough not to be e smoking!

I’m convinced that an interesting life begins when you’re young. When you learn to feel as at ease in a yurt as you might in a palace; when you’re as happy to talk to a nomad as you are to a noble, a truck driver, a dictator, or a socialite. When you enter a place you’ve never been before—that’s whether it’s local or on the other side of the world—with your eyes and your mind, wide open. Even if you don’t like what you see, it helps to keep the heart half open, too.